ODOT

This week was my final Traffic & Transportation class at PSU. It’s been super inspiring to learn from regional transportation professionals through the weekly lectures, and to see what interests fellow Portlanders to make positive changes in our communities. Over the next quarter, I plan to keep up a weekly “class night” to work on projects and learn.

What I’m reading this week:

Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency: Inside a stunned White House, the President considers his legacy and America’s future. – This one is a long read, but worth the time. Some quotes I enjoyed: “Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,” he said. “And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that.”

“The thing that I have always been convinced of,” he said, “the running thread through my career, has been this notion that when ordinary people get engaged, pay attention, learn about the forces that affect their lives and are able to join up with others, good stuff happens.” –via The New Yorker

DO: In the words of our President… Get engaged. Pay attention. Learn about the forces that affect your life. Join up with other. Good stuff will happen.

Does rent control work? Evidence from Berlin – It’s been a year since Berlin enacted a cap on rent increases on existing rentals (based on age, size, # of floors and amenities etc) with modest increases over time. New construction and apartments that are substantially renovated are exempt from the rent control limits. “While posed as a way of promoting affordability for low income households, in practice, rent control may actually provide greater benefits for higher income renters. High income renters may be more savvy in dealing with landlords and exercising their rights, and less subject to the economic dislocations that force low income households to move from rent controlled apartments. Over time, having acquired the “right” to live in a rent controlled apartment, some better off households may choose not to move, or to buy a home, with the result being a lower rate of turnover in apartments: further restricting the supply of housing.” –via City Observatory

DO: Housing affordability is a really complex issue. I’m trying to learn about the different sides and the cause and effect of what some policy changes might do here in Portland.

Mayors Set a Tight Deadline to Initiate Climate Action – “The C40 plan calls for member cities to reduce the average emission per person from 5 metric tons to 2.9 by 2030. That reduction will largely come through city-wide “climate actions,” which include things like installing bike lanes and retrofitting buildings with clean energy sources. Collectively, cities have taken 11,000 actions like these so far. By 2020, they’ll need 14,000 more, and roughly three-quarters of that must come from wealthy, high carbon-emitting cities located mostly in the global north.” “Mayors, state, and subnational governments are in a stronger position to deliver on their promises than national governments.” –via City Lab

DO: Portland is an “Innovator City” in the C40. Portland has a Climate Action Plan hidden in the depths of despair that is the Portlandoregon.gov website. Here’s a link to the full pdf The “At a Glance” section is 26 pages in. “This Climate Action Plan identifies twenty 2030 objectives and more than one hundred actions to be completed or significantly underway in the next five years.”

This Week’s Actions: This week, I attended my final Traffic and Transportation Class at PSU, donated to a local environmental nonprofit through GiveGuide!, and stayed off Facebook (25 days now!).

About

Just a Portlander working on action steps for our lovable, livable city. I'm documenting what I learn as I try to help make our city a better place. The goal for myself is less news and social media consumption “faux action/outrage”, more listening, more action.